"The kingdom of God does not come with your careful observation, nor will people say, 'Here it is,' or 'There it is,' because the kingdom of God is within you." Luke 17:21

Wednesday, December 29, 2010

The Second Coming of Reb YHSHWH by Carlo Suares

Available here : The Second Coming of Reb YHShWH
Carlo Suares was a biblical scholar and extraordinary student of the Kabbalah who developed a very personal, idiosyncratic, and compelling vision of mystical Christianity. He speaks in beautiful language, imagery, and poetical mystical concepts to the modern seeker of a genuine relationship with the divine.
His focus in this book is the so-called second coming of Jesus, or the Reb Yhshwh, as he insists on calling him (doing the Reb, he says, the courtesy of calling him by his real name, as well as attempting to shed, by this simple act, the overlay of Hellenistic mystery religion grafted on to Yhshwh's thoroughly semitic teaching by the Hellenistically educated and influenced evangelists, Paul in particular). To him, the second coming is an immanent event in the here and now, happening within consciousness. It is a dual movement towards monistic consciousness while still being rooted in the personal perspective of the individual. A non-dual awareness and vision of form and emptiness, the noumenal and the phenomenal, the sacred and profane, unity and diversity, results from this movement inconsciousness. He provides straightforward, as well as interpretive and Kabbalistic, references to both the Canonical and Gnostic gospels to make his point, consistently using the figure of Peter, "the Rock," in both his roles as founder of the hierarchical church and the disciple who's consciousness was most rooted in materialism, as a counterpoint to the consciousness Yhshwh enables and opens in humanity. That consciousness has much in common with that described in the literature of other non-dual mystical philosophies, such as Advaita Vedanta, Mahayana Buddhism, and Hindu Tantra, but Suares' spin on it remains very much his own and never sinks to the level of the generic spiritual insight.

This is a complex and wonderful book, challenging the reader, and going way beyond the superficial treatments of mystical Christianity that are currently popular in the New Age press. Suares seeks not to convince, but rather, to allow his readers to think, feel, and experience directly, for themselves, in a spiritual fashion. He seeks to give a taste of Gnosis, the Gnosis offered by Reb Yhshwh, whom he unabashedly claims as his spiritual inspiration and teacher, while thoroughly rejecting mainstream churches of every persuasion.

In the current renaissance of interest in both historical and contemporary Gnosticism, Carlo Suares is a name that is not well known, but needs to be. - Review by Tom Nash